Mr. Hackett, in the Character of Rip Van Winkle by Henry Inman shows the actor, James Henry Hackett in the role of his lifetime.

James Henry Hackett didn’t have much going for him. Okay, he did attend Columbia University, but he never finished due to bad health. In 1825, he lost his money in bad investments, after which his wife had to go back to acting to make ends meet. He did, however, have the stage, which turned his life around. In 1828, he played Falstaff in "Henry IV, Part I" and afterwards became known as an impressions guy. In 1830, he got his best role as Rip Van Winkle, his portrayal of which was dubbed, “the best before Joseph Jefferson’s (another actor)". What can I say? He was a man made up of mediocrity. While he would never find fame as a great tragedian, he found success in theatre management and playwriting, and even corresponded with John Quincy Adams about Shakespeare.

Rip Van Winkle from the short story "Rip Van Winkle" by Washington Irving was not unlike James Henry Hackett. You can totally see him being lazy and prone to long naps. One particular nap, from which we see Rip waking here in the forests of the Catskill mountains, lasted twenty years. There was only one slight interruption, in which he got very drunk (or at least dreamed of getting very drunk). But other than that he just snoozed. He snoozed right through the American Revolution and when he woke up and went down to his town, he found everything to be different. He blamed it on the a-a-a-a-a-alcohol but even that didn’t make sense to him. Before the nap, everyone knew and loved Rip Van Winkle. No dogs would bark at him, kids in the town loved to play with him, and if ever Rip and his wife fought, everyone blamed it on her because everyone believed that he was too sweet and even-tempered to ever start something himself. But when he came back he found that his wife had died (which was a relief to him), his children had had children of their own, and his beard had grown a foot. Right up until he found his daughter and grandchild, Rip thought he was going insane. He hardly knew who he was, where he was, or how he had gotten there. But once he found his family, he just went on living his life like he did before the nap and never thought twice about how or why he missed twenty years of his life sleeping. No doctor or therapist was consulted, which might be the oddest part of the story.